Balance update & advancement

Double shotgun is now more powerful, it will shoot 3 times more bullets than before (before it was just useless, now compared to shotgun it uses 2 times more ammos, reloads 2 times slower, has higher spreading, but shoots 3 times more bullets)

Homing fireballs from fatman will now follow player earlier (was way too late before, making them act like normal fireballs most of the time)

Missile turret can now fire fragmentation missile at high level (they can be distinguished as they go a lot slower than normal missile)

I got ride of around 60-80% of the garbage collection I think, a lot less objects are instantiated now.

The game is still not playable on Android, somehow it crashes earlier than before just after moving a few in a level, I think there might an out of memory exception, but there’s no trace in the logs, so I’m not really sure. There could also be a problem with video memory, as I use it a bit more than before.

Maybe the solution will be to do direct rendering, currently Snorms is rendered in two steps:

A background thread that generates cache image for all tiles (with lights)

The main render thread that displays cache, and then draws sprites and particles on top

Switching to direct rendering will remove the first step, it will save video memory but I will have to render tiles quicker. I still don’t know if Android devices will be capable of doing direct rendering, I will have to optimize my code, or maybe I will have to remove textures from the game (rendering flat color instead of texture is a lot quicker). I don’t think removing texture for the android game would be such an issue, it could even be somehow more “artistic” 🙂

We will see, currently I still have to get ride of the remaining garbage collectors, and then I will investigate this. I hope I can get a working version by the end of next week, not sure though.